That’s right! A.R. Murugadoss has said recently that Thuppakki was initially not written for Vijay but for Bollywood superstar Akshay Kumar. He also revealed that in an attempt to avoid doing remakes like he did with Ghajini in Hindi, he decided to do a direct Hindi film with Akshay Kumar in the lead with the script of Thuppakki. As the story is set in Mumbai, he felt that it would work as a proper Bollywood film.
At the same time ARM was in talks with Vijay’s father director S.A. Chandrashekar about doing a project with him. Luckily, as some things are just meant to happen, Vijay had immediate dates while Akshay Kumar could work only 3 months later. This prompted ARM to jump into action and make most use of Vijay’s dates and rolled out the production of Thuppakki.
